I say “My Take” because like anything else in a professional kitchen, there are innumerable ways of doing something “right,” and in this post, you’ll get to see from quite a few different sources what I believe to be a holistic view of the practice of knife sharpening.

Sharpness & Shelf-Life

In an experiment to see how the sharpness of a knife can affect the duration of a product’s shelf-life, Clay Allison, an entrepreneur we’ll be coming back to, cut cross sections of celery with a sharp knife and then with a dull knife, bagged them in ziploc bags and kept them in a fridge for 2.5 days.

And here are the results after 9.5 days:

So apparently, a knife’s edge can really make a difference…which is why the Japanese are so fond of the intricacies of knife sharpening: